Experts at DSPCon Inc. in Bridgewater, N.J., needed a software tool to help them integrate digital signal processing (DSP) systems with a wide variety of I/O. So they chose the File Transfer Language (FTL) from Pentek Inc. of Upper Saddle River, N.J.
"We do a lot of systems integration, and we frequently deal with a number of I/O interfaces," explains DSPCon President Al Brower. "From high-speed DSPs, FTL supports all these I/O interfaces without us having to develop code; it removes from us the need to program up all those device drivers."
FTL is a file management system for VME-based DSP and data acquisition subsystems that includes a collection of software libraries for initializing, organizing, sorting, and retrieving data. It runs on any Texas Instruments 320C40-based DSP board from Pentek. Host workstations connect via ethernet, while DSP processors and peripherals connect over VMEbus and SCSI storage devices. FTL supports the C and SPOX programming environments.
DSPCon`s Brower says FTL`s graphic user interface also helped his engineers simulate systems in real time. "It allows you to deploy DSP-based tasks right from Windows 95, for example, and see real-time signals in various forms, such as time-series and spectral signals."
DSPCon engineers recently completed an acoustic vibration data acquisition system for Lockheed Martin for space shuttle payload testing. "The tool saved us a lot of time - arguably months on real-time signal processing systems," Brower says. - J.K.
For more information, contact Pentek by phone at 201-818-5900, by fax at 201-818-5904, by e-mail at info@pentek. com, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.pentek.com/.
